Ask HN: Are you teaching your kids to program?

3 points by abstractbill 31 days ago | 1 comment

I'm still teaching my kids to code. I'm interested to hear if I'm increasingly alone in this, or if others are doing it too.

A few years ago I was firmly in the camp who felt programming was a new form of literacy, and the important question wasn't "should we teach it", but "how should we teach it". These days I'm less certain, but it still feels worth doing on balance.

My own situation, in case anyone is interested: I retired a few years before LLMs took off, so I've never actually used them as a professional engineer, only on my own time. I'm currently teaching my daughters to write python on their Nintendo 3DS consoles (I used codex to build us a really nice python environment on the 3DS, including a good amount of pygame and other useful libraries). It's going well!

I would love to hear your thoughts, motivations, and experiences, if you're teaching kids to code.

gyulai 31 days ago |

If it was my son and he was enjoying it, I would support him, mostly because of the secondary effects of learning to code on cognitive development. I am of a mind that coding teaches you to think logically. It's not the same as "literacy", though, in my opinion. So, if he wasn't enjoying it, I definitely wouldn't force him to learn it on similar grounds as I might force him to learn to read.

If he wanted to pursue an actual career in the space (like I did), I would actively try to dissuade him. I think the reasons that applied to me when I got into this in the late 90s / early 00s, simply no longer apply. I would get out, if I could, myself, right now.